How one atheist sees life

The reason that there are more male over-achievers is the same reason that there are more male serial killers. Men will excel at something, mediocre is not the thing men do. There can be and are many reasons for this situation. Men do not follow the bell curve in most comparisons. They generally fall at one end or the other, not in the middle. There is a reason for this and I’m not going to tell you what it is. I want you to think about it. I want you to think about all the men that find themselves not in the top 10% and what they must contend with in life. Even as I strive to be a renaissance man of sorts I know that I’m not on the very high end and not at the low end. I’ve known this for a long time. I’m above average but for men – this doesn’t count. I’m not Alexander the Great and I’m not Jack the Ripper. I’m nobody. The world doesn’t hate me and the world doesn’t love me. The world doesn’t care about me. As a man that leaves me with few choices and a big tax burden. I was born this way. Born screwed. I’m fortunate enough to have gone to school before the horrors described in this video. Still, life is what it is and I have to live with it. I won’t get special treatment. I won’t get special dispensation. I won’t get anything that I don’t earn or steal myself. I think that society has forgotten this about our culture. We’ve focussed on the wrong things for too long. Now more innocents get to pay for other people’s mistakes and greed.

I shouldn’t have to show you pictures of or tell you about Charleston, McKinney, Baltimore, and other places which have been in the news lately. As proven by thousands of blog posts and news broadcasts there are a many opinions about what is wrong and why it is wrong and why the other group who is complaining is wrong.

The fundamentalists told us the mass killings in schools was because there was no god allowed in schools, now they tell us that it’s the gay agenda that got the Charleston 9 killed. Everyone is busy blaming everyone and everything else as the cause of the violence, hatred, and … well… humans being humans.

We hear a lot about how feminists think society should be or at least what they think is wrong. Blacks tell us what they think is wrong. Each political party tells us what they think is wrong. In fact there is an endless stream of people and groups that are more than willing to tell the rest of us what is wrong with the world today, or society, or that other country etc.

I have my own ideas about who is to blame and what groups we could do without. My unspoken knee-jerk reactions would make vehement fundamentalists look like babes in cradles should I let them fester and act on them. I’m not here to talk about those or such from other people. In fact I’m not here to talk in this post other than to ask a simple question of all who read this.

What does a society without racism, bigotry, cultural hatred and similar items look like? Maybe you’ve only thought what it would be like without violent cops. Maybe you’ve only thought of what it would be like without gender inequality. Maybe you’ve only thought about what it would be like with equality under the law for all people. No matter what your pet project is I want to know what you think a society would look like that did not have hatred, racism, bigotry, fundamentalism, gender inequality, sexual orientation discrimination and so on. What would that world or country look like?

Between this current world we live in and the utopian world I’ve asked about, what are the low hanging fruits that we can work together to start us on that path to the world without the worst parts of humanity?

Go on, I want to hear it in the comments. I want to know what we are supposed to do to fix the giant fucking mess we humans have made of life and living. I want to hear how we fix it not what is wrong with it.

So tell us, what does a ‘perfect’ world look like? How does it work? Where would you fit in that world? Where would McKinney cops fit in that world? Where would former racists (of every color) fit in that world?

I know many may read this. Some may even click the like button. What I really want is to hear what a ‘perfect’ society would be like. Let’s have that discussion here.

Here are some thoughts that I can get behind. Respect is earned not demanded. You cannot legislate reason nor criminalize thought. Ideas are successful because they are true. Respect for ideas that are not true is simply Ostrich thinking.

As an outspoken atheist I’ve come across the “be respectful of others’ beliefs” sentiment many times when expressing my thoughts. The funny thing about it is I’ve been told that sort of thing by fellow atheists on several occasions. It’s as though they feel they’re being very nice and protective of the religious group being criticized. I see where they’re coming from, because of empathy we don’t want to see others feelings get hurt because we know what hurt feelings can be like. But I must say I greatly disagree that having people censor themselves is a respectful route to take, and I don’t think it’s important to protect people from getting hurt feelings.

Whenever I’ve been told to be respectful of religious beliefs one of my immediate thoughts has been, well what about my beliefs? I don’t think telling someone they can’t share what they believe is very respectful…

Like this:

"Be quiet now," said an old Nurse to a child sitting on her
lap. "If you make that noise again I will throw you to the Wolf."
Now it chanced that a Wolf was passing close under the window
as this was said. So he crouched down by the side of the house
and waited. "I am in good luck to-day," thought he. "It is sure
to cry soon, and a daintier morsel I haven't had for many a long
day." So he waited, and he waited, and he waited, till at last
the child began to cry, and the Wolf came forward before the
window, and looked up to the Nurse, wagging his tail. But all the
Nurse did was to shut down the window and call for help, and the
dogs of the house came rushing out. "Ah," said the Wolf as he
galloped away,
"Enemies promises were made to be broken."

How many times each day do you listen to an ‘enemy’ and believe their promises? Even “between 620 and 560 BCE” such wisdom was common among those that cared to know things.

Worse than that, we tell ourselves lies and pretend that people made promises based on what we think they should have done.

The other moral here is to know your enemies…. especially the one you see in the mirror.

Now, I know that all you readers have your own musical tastes, but this is what is on my music player today

This might simply be a side note on an otherwise huge debate regarding the subject of this post but I would like to share a few thoughts about that

That video shows imagery which were built from actual photographs taken by space craft that we humans have sent out into the solar system. Apparently a creator god made Ceres too. Go on, watch that video again. There is a dwarf planet in our solar system that looks just like this (nearly). Why did it need to be created? Why did it need to be pummelled with asteroids so many times. Why would it need to have water on it? What was the creator’s plan for this rock that might have more fresh water than Earth does.

Ceres is not the only body begging these questions.

If you read the holy books of Earth’s religions none of them address this. None of them predicted humans getting up close photographs of these space bodies or even landing craft on them. Since the dawn of modern science we have been living beyond the grasp of anything in those holy books. You may be reading this post on your phone, even watching the video on your phone. In your hand is more technology than could even be dreamed of in the stories of the holy books.

What is the creator god’s position on bioethics? Is it okay to eat meat grown in a lab? Is it okay to grow new body parts and then graft them on to our bodies? Is it okay to augment our bodies to make them better than his supposed design? Is it okay for us to change our diets to improve our cognitive abilities? Is it okay to use nuclear energy to provide energy for the survival of humans? There are thousands more questions that the holy books cannot and will not answer. Everything that any believer has to say about the modern world is simply interpretation to try to make it fit into the ideals of the ancient world. I’d be willing to bet that if we had a time machine nobody would go back to 500 bce to bring someone to this day to work on cars, and with good reason. Why do we keep bringing books from that time to our current day thinking they will fix our problems? I know that was not the best analogy but the point stands.

What would be Moses’ take on images of Ceres or Pluto? Could or should we expect anything cogent if he could answer?

What do you think Moses would make of our technology, the technology that we take for granted?

A lot of believers spend a great deal of time worshipping their deity of choice. You know the one, the deity their parents handed down to them like an old bicycle from grandpa. That religious belief takes a lot of effort. They are in church once, twice, maybe more times per week.

The math quickly: 16 waking hours times 7 is 112 waking hours per week. If you take away 3 (18.75%) hours per day for meals and meal related things we’re down to 91. Let’s say we spend an hour per day (6.25%) on hygienic activities. Basic survival means we spend 50% of our lives doing mandatory things as a kind of average value.That’s 12 hours per day to stay alive and leaves us 84 hours per week for other stuff.

That doesn’t count the hours spent each week at work or travelling to and from work. It takes 50% of our time to simply keep breathing. Of the other 50% we have about 9 hours per day 5 days a week for work as a sort of minimum. That drops our 84 hours to 39 on average, less for a great many people.

To get a calculation, let’s say the religious believer goes to a meeting building 3 times per week. Preparation, travel, and meeting time (I’m guessing) take up the better part of 4.5 hours or 13.5 hours per week.

13.5 hours is 34.62% of our available time, on average.

Where there is a choice, believers (arguably) spend more than 1/3 of their disposable time worshipping their ‘deity of choice’. Now let’s add in daily prayer and other events such as bible study and discussion etc. It can quickly and easily become 50% of their disposable time. That would leave them 19.5 hours per week to do things other than survive, work, and worship. Average television time for Americans is around 3 hours per day (ref) , and that drops the disposable time to a negative value. I didn’t count household chores etc. You can use the link to adjust the values to see where the time goes.

So where do the religious folk get their worshipping time from? If religion was an app on your phone, it’d be too busy to be useful.